Eddie Lorton Finds Financial Wrongdoing Within Reno Government

I’m really getting tired of seeing our current financial leaders waste the hard-earned tax dollars of Reno citizens. I can cite dozens of examples of what I call “bad idea spending” from Reno’s current governing body, but recently I uncovered one example that is actually criminal.

At Wednesday’s council meeting I uncovered a misappropriation of funds of over $ 300,000.00 on 2 different wrongfully approved contracts, and if my findings are correct, there are more examples of this to come.

One of them is called Aerotek for over $ 230,000.00; and the other is called AppleOne for over $73,000.00. Both of these were approved without a vote which, as per our current system, is well over the limit of expenditure and therefore constitutes misappropriation of funds.

In total it took me approximately two hours of research to uncover and extract this information from their system, which truthfully, I don’t think anyone else would have found. Obviously they’re not looking that hard at ways to save tax dollars, or even trying to run things efficiently.

At first the city council tried to deny wrongdoing when I called them out on this. That is, until I presented evidence at this past meeting of what I had uncovered. In the face of undeniable proof, they were forced to admit their mistakes, and ended up putting these issues on the agenda for the next meeting. These are issues that should have been voted on initially, not after the fact in a manner that screams “oops, we got caught”.

On a personal note, I hope the council does not approve these funds since they are being spent on another useless system called Automated Data Processing Inc. (A.D.P.) This whole thing reminds me of the wasted money spent on the parking kiosk debacle that never worked properly.

Speaking of which, so far, the city has spent $230,000.00 on A.D.P. but they’re also buying another $150,000.00 in computer equipment since the data processers in the old systems will not run the updated A.D.P. protocols. Just think; 9 months of trying to make this work, and the system is still not working.

The sad thing is that it all sounds too familiar. How much more unnecessary spending and wasted time are going to be thrown at bad financial decisions before we, the people of Reno, stand up and say “enough is enough”. Our city is $580,000,000.00 in debt. That number is unreal enough as it is and in the face of such debt, any questionable spending at the very least, warrants a “second look”. We really need an injection of common sense into Reno politics.

Part of the reason I decided to write about both my recent finding of government misappropriation of funds, and Reno’s poor decisions regarding spending in general, is that the misappropriation was not reported on whatsoever by local media outlets.

At the end of the day, I’m going to do whatever it takes to point out bad financial decisions when I see them, and ensure that our tax dollars are being spent in the best way possible.